A 23-year veteran who has served much of that time on the department's Collision Analysis & Reconstruction Squad, Gallagher is charged with investigating serious accidents and knows the toll of speeding, drunken or distracted driving.

"It is a huge quality of life issue. And I see it from my work with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and doing all the fatality investigations," Gallagher said. "I see the damage that people, driving like morons, can cause, whether it is through speed, alcohol or distracted driving. So, I'd like to do something to reduce or influence those people's pain and the victim's pain."

Gallagher has been assigned to head up a newly formed Traffic Enforcement Unit charged with slowing down speeders, getting drunk drivers off the road and potentially reducing the number of accidents in the city.

In a city where the number of fatal motor vehicle accidents often outnumbers murder cases, it makes sense to allocate more resources to traffic enforcement, Gallagher said.

"Historically, there have been more people killed in traffic accidents than homicides," he said.

So far this year, there have been five fatalities and only one homicide. In 2012, there were four traffic fatalities. In 2011, there was one, while 2010 saw four and 2009 had two.

To make officers available to staff the four-member traffic team, Chief Jon Fontneau and Assistant Chief James Matheny disbanded the Neighborhood Intervention Unit that was set up several years ago to battle inner-city crime. Even though city police make an average 2,700 car stops a month, Fontneau and Matheny said more has to be done to get drivers under control and make Stamford a safer place to drive.

Overall, Fontneau said he hears more complaints about traffic and bad driving than any other issue from residents and city offiicals.

A month into the unit's start, the officers have written about 350 tickets, mostly for speeding and the others for red lights, passing stopped school buses, unregistered vehicles, overweight trucks and equipment violations.

The unit has been very busy picking off speeders on High Ridge Road, Long Ridge Road and Washington Boulevard. Sometimes they work during the day and sometimes at night.

Gallagher said they were working High Ridge and Long Ridge because of frequent complaints from residents who were having trouble getting out of their driveways because traffic is moving so quickly on the well-traveled arteries that stretch to New York State.

Most traffic complaints involve speeders, reckless drivers and people distracted by their cell phones he said.

Because the unit is using marked police cars now, they are only able to catch the "low-hanging fruit" of traffic violators, he said, but with two unmarked cars on the way, Gallagher expects to make some effective downtown traffic crackdowns.

During an afternoon rush hour blitz at Bulls Head a week and a half ago, the unit wrote half a dozen tickets for red light running, seven more for using cellphones and one person got a ticket for passing a stopped school bus.

The one ray of light in the flurry of tickets written during those nearly three hours at one of the city's busiest intersections was that no one was seen blocking the intersection.

About two weeks ago, Gallagher was parked on Sunset Road with his black Ford Explorer pointed toward High Ridge Road about 30 feet away.

Listening to his police radio, waiting for the description of the next car caught speeding southbound by a radar unit parked right next to the Long Ridge Fire Company station, Gallagher said he and his officers are not out to write tickets for minor infractions, but are looking for drivers who are flagrantly disobeying the law.

At about that time he got the radio call to pull over a Ford Explorer with Connecticut plates who had just come down the hill southbound towards the fire station doing 59 mph in the 45 mph speed zone.

"We are not looking to hurt anybody," he said, explaining that they aren't writing people up for driving just three, four or five miles per hour over the speed limit. "But the fact of the matter is, people are just out of control at this point. They don't realize how much distance you cover in the time it takes to text an entire word. I mean you can travel several hundred feet. It's just crazy. What is so important that you have to text while driving?"

For those using their cell phones when they drive, Gallagher said the problem is more serious than it seems.

Near the beginning of October Gallagher said he was on Washington Boulevard and saw a woman driving with two cellphones, one in each hand.

"I said ma'am, two phones? And she said she was looking up the number on one phone while dialing the number with the other," he said.

"We were stopping, ticketing and towing tri-Axle dump trucks, ticketing commercial vehicles from national chains that had not renewed their registration. It was surprising, a little disappointing, but surprising as well," he said.

As time goes on, Gallagher said he wants to begin collaborating with probation officers and targeting repeat drunk driving offenders for compliance checks.

In 2012 police made 117 operating under the influence arrests, 33 due to accidents. In 2011 there were 243 DUI arrests, 59 due to crashes and in 2010 the department made 178 DUI arrests, 65 due to crashes, he said.

"Those are the people who go out and kill people," Gallagher said. "Recitative drunk driving is a huge problem ... Those are the people I really want to go after."